Top Gear: Burma Special, part two, review

Gerard O'Donovan reviews the second part of the Top Gear Burma Special

As season finales go, the closing part of Top Gear: Burma Special was an absolute blast. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are justly celebrated for their ability to bring chaos to pretty much any part of the globe during their road trips. And even by Top Gear’s high standards the concluding hour of this 1,200-mile journey through Burma and Thailand was utter bedlam.

We left them last week having driven for seven eventful – and entertainingly pain-wracked – days, and the terrible threesome were now entering the historically conflict-riven partitionist Shan State (“to Burma as Scotland is to Britain,” said Clarkson, with typical diplomacy skills). Surprisingly, that section of the film proved the most humdrum, largely because Clarkson overegged beyond credibility the extent of the Top Gear team’s courageous, trail-blazing ways (as if the health & safety obsessed BBC would let loose in a war zone its most successful export). That said, the party they all attended before departing Shan State certainly had something of Apocalypse Now to it – mostly when it came to describing Hammond’s hangover the morning after.

No matter, the landscapes were truly staggering (“I feel like I’ve taken a short cut through the set of Game of Thrones” said Clarkson). And the endless mechanical failures of their trucks, plus the severe buttock-pummelling suffered by all three from the dreadful road surfaces, was entertainment enough in itself. Add to that the usual endless succession of puerile japes – tipping a sleeping Clarkson out of his tipper truck, weeing in Hammond’s shower cistern, hoisting May’s tent on a crane, again – and intentional prangs, and you had all the elements of a classic Top Gear travelogue.

That’s not even taking into account their ultimate challenge: to construct a vehicle-bearing, bamboo-based river crossing a lá David Lean’s classic PoW movie Bridge on the River Kwai. That halfway through the bridge build the waterway was discovered to be the unfortunately (if aptly) named Kok rather than the Kwai was just one of many very funny, if less than entirely credible, moments in a closing half hour that summed up perfectly why this is such a spectacularly popular show.

It must be said though that, this season, Top Gear has felt less like a show for petrol heads (and more like a thrill-a-minute theme park ride) than ever before. Much as I’ve enjoyed it I wish that, next season, they would strip things back to the essentials again, and turn the balance of attention back to cars.